


Briarheart

by mortalitasi



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, General, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:18:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Loghain catches Orlesian nobles at play. The experience stays with him forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Briarheart

The sun is golden in the wheat when the noblemen drive the first of them out.

He hears the clear, sweet cut of Orlesian on the air, like spoken sugar, and thinks with a very familiar and tired-out loathing that he hates hearing it, hates the rounding syllables and the ridiculous rolling sounds and their pompous titles. He hates them, and it’s why he stoops through the brush to the edge of the field and elbows aside the brambles to watch, and lies still as death while the noblemen in their silks and scarlet finery glide through the wheat like gods on horseback, the sheaves parting for their geldings’ legs. Their stirrups wink and glint coldly. Their boots are of fine doeskin, thigh-high, unwrinkled, ostentatiously gilded and decorated— needless.

One rides a roan filly with a spirited head and an intelligent gleam in her eyes, and he instantly begrudges the lordling on her back for holding the bit too tightly, too cruelly, not giving her enough rein. They treat their animals like they do their people— viciously, though the violence is dressed in expensive clothes and dripping with jewels, all show and no substance.

He wants to put them knee-deep in mud. He wants them to know what it is to dig graves for your brothers with no shovels to use but your hands, to dig and dig till your fingers are raw and bloody and knowing what it is that you can’t stop until you know it’s enough. It’s never enough.

The man who has the misfortune of standing in the beginning of the line the lordlings have arranged does not last longer than a minute. He cries and falls to his knees amidst the swaying stalks, swallowed by the sea of yellow, the sound of his pleas echoing over the buzz of the spring flies and the ringing in Loghain’s ears. A cloud of gnats gathers around his head when the lordling on the filly bends down leisurely over his ornate saddle and almost contemptuously punches a hole through the farmer’s throat with a dirk so fine it seems to bend in the afternoon light.

Loghain listens to the commonfolk wail as they watch the man splutter and choke and die on the dusty ground, listens as the lordling instructs his footman to clean the dirk on the farmer’s threadbare tunic. The gaggle of peasants thins and nearly scatters when the footman reaches down to complete his task, and the only child in the group clings to her mother’s apron with a strength in her bony little hands that turns her knuckles white against the filthy skirts. She is a ghost— they all are— a starved little wraith with a darkness under her eyes that is as much sleepless nights as it is fear.

The voice of the footman floats to him from across the clearing. “Very good, ser,” the footman is saying, and his accent is thick and northern and Fereldan. The lordling on the filly strikes so quickly Loghain doesn’t even see the move, but the streak of crimson on the footman’s cheek tells him all he needs to know.

“ _Monsieur_ ,” he hears the lordling say. It is the voice of a boy not past his thirteenth season.

"Very good,  _monsieur_ ,” the footman amends in a drone as he replaces the dirk in the lordling’s sheath.

Drive it into his throat, why won’t you drive it into his throat, Loghain is thinking when they send a pair of the farmers running, and he doesn’t understand what is happening until the noblemen laugh and spur their horses on. The men are trampled like parchment under heel before they’ve made even a hundred yards’ worth of progress, crumpling sadly and easily and with muffled cries that end in cracks and thuds— they splinter like twigs against the ground, and the peasants cry, but still the little girl remains dry-eyed while the noblemen congratulate each other on timing most ferocious behind their masks.

“ _Chien_ ,” says the youngest lordling to the hollow-faced footman, holding out a gloved hand, “fetch me my Isabeau.”

Isabeau is a crossbow of yew with a lathe fifty inches across, dark and gleaming, and the lordling handles her with more care than he affords his filly. He is pulling the string and loading a bolt into the catch when one of the other noblemen sets a riding crop across the shoulders of the mother, but she is on her feet before they can berate her, pushing the little girl in front of her as she stumbles. Loghain sees the bob of the girl’s head against the horizon of her tiny shoulders, and the pump of her stick-thin legs as she races across and over ground, the wheat flying behind her.

"Run, Alice!" her mother is screaming, skirts lifted past her ankles. " _Run_!”

There is only the sound of the little one’s pattering sprint and the heart pounding between his ribs. Only that.

Closer she comes, until Loghain can make out the stitching in her rough child’s frock, and the world is quiet as the grave when Isabeau speaks. It’s a single word, one punctuated  _thuck_ , but nothing seems amiss before the mother howls. The girl goes still, taking another unsteady step. She lifts her eyes to the bramble bush, to him, and they are grey and pale and harrowed of all joy, dead even before she truly dies face-down on the chalky ground with Isabeau’s bolt buried up till the fletching in her skull. Red blooms between the strands of her matted hair and he has to look away.

The mother is still weeping when they ride her down like a rabid dog, still weeping when they silence her.

“ _Toutes mes félicitations_ , Louis!  _Tres magnifique_!”

The congratulations comes from another nobleman astride a great destrier, but it is the lordling Loghain is watching. His smiling babe’s mask gleams bright as he turns and hefts Isabeau underarm.

"It is the small ones that are most difficult.  _Chien_  would know.”

The footman blinks. “Very good,  _monsieur_.”

  
—

  
It takes over an hour for the next one to die. By the time they are down to the last pair, the noblemen are laughing like drunkards at a tavern and Isabeau has seen more sport than Loghain would care to remember. He crawls away when they set the old man out into the fields.

The tears burn on his cheeks as he drags through the bramble, but it is not the thorns that are making him bleed.


End file.
